Last week it appears that Der8auer and Elmor took some time to take a deep look at the newly released Radeon RX 480 card from AMD. An initial examination revealed a somewhat tepid overclocking experience, one that was certainly not helped by the reference design not having a particularly good cooler, plus the fact that voltage tweaking using standard software utilities were essentially limited to around 1.15 volts.

In an effort to squeeze a bit more from the Polaris-based GPU the guys installed a Raijintek GPU water block to eliminate thermal restrictions. They then installed an EVC (Elmor Voltage Controller) to resolve voltage restraints. The upshot is in fact that the RX 480 card and its VRM design is actually more than capable of providing more than 1.3 volts to the GPU without issue – a fact that allows overclockers much more headroom to push the potential performance of AMD’s Polaris GPU.